This is well worth sharing.
James O'Brien appears to be in the same space as I am:
As Brexit nears completion, James O'Brien, who has predicted nearly every twist and turn, has delivered what has been described as, his most powerful monologue yet. @MrJamesOB pic.twitter.com/ww3QabrzUv
— LBC (@LBC) December 11, 2020
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I have rarely heard such a powerful piece of controlled rage. James does us all a great service in expressing it.
His examples – the complaints about telling history in historical houses, and the furore about the lack of “an audience singing at an event that doesn’t have an audience” – to give but two , show how the powers that be persist in believing they lead a country populated by gullible halfwits who can be easily misled by the nose.
The fundamental problem here is that we meet such a population, in the guise of Mail, Times, Telegraph, Express and Sun readers, which thus constitutes a veritable list of shame.
I told a friend recently, half in jest, that my forthcoming holiday reading would be focused on studies of ideology, propaganda, and a recently published biography of one of the biggest political liars in modern history, Goebbels. I now foresee a festive season underscored by serious intent!
It is terrible to think that this is where we are as a nation, and I fear worse is to come before we start to climb out of the hole that forty odd years of neoliberalism have landed us in.
I was watching this just before I went onto your blog.
I am with you and James, too.
Probably considered a minor point, but by being Scottish, I find it irritating that most commentators keep saying ” the country “, when I expect they mean, and should say, the U.K. In his rant he makes some good points, but for me it loses momentum, and meaning, because of what I feel is his unthinking bias.
I believe most Metrocentric journalists, while they may mean the four countries, and three Crown Dependencies that comprise the present U.K, they give the impression that they mean England. and that for me at least, is a reason to doubt the sincerity of their message.
Acknowledged
He’s spot on with what he says and I agree with it.
Sad thing is, I don’t think it will change the minds of those it is aimed at. It will probably just result in insults being hurled – remoaner, sore loser, snowflake and so on.
Craig
Splendid rant – and I waited for that beautifully weighted last word – “again”! How true.
My only worry when I hear this, or its like, is that too many people now will misunderstand the satiric faux positive passages. It may well be that we are that far down the rabbit hole or – as an unvaccinated Mr W. S. from Warwickshire might have had it – the time is now so out of joint, I fear there’s no man born can set it right!
I hope my comment sits well with James rant.
As the Hard BrexShit train speeds off the ends of the Article 50 tracks with a disorderly exit from the EU — here are a selection of this mornings egregious actions by Bozo and his clown Circus.
FISH
Not just the bollocks of our ‘fleet’ of naval ships (2 in reality) policing our sea borders against these evil EU nicking the fish which pass through ‘our’ water. That in itself is absurd as the satellite guided, radar fish finding, super trawlers will just carry on hoovering up everything before the poor fishes get anywhere near poxy British territorial waters, which our fishermen have already sold their quotas for decades ago.
They did so because its a dangerous job in our tiny old trawlers — very rare to hear of disasters and deaths at sea nowadays, thank god — but apparently the government wants to see more! Just as the Bullies want to see more deaths at Xmas for the proles but not their own.
As they joyously leave a trail like a Bullingdon in a EU China shop level of disruption, the entitled brats who never grow out of their antediluvian brainwashing.
SCHOOLS
So alight on this mornings threat (oddly published by the Obsessive at least 12 hours before it normally would!)
‘The government is using its emergency powers under the Coronavirus Act to threaten to use legal action against headteachers in England who want to allow their pupils to learn remotely in the run-up to Christmas.
The Observer understands any schools that were planning to move most of their teaching online during the last week of term, to ensure none of their pupils would have to self-isolate on Christmas Day, are being ordered to remain open.’
HYPOCRISY,
Meanwhile Eton — where Bozo and his clowns learnt their whorish manners —
‘Eton College has closed temporarily to stem a rising number of coronavirus cases among teachers and pupils, it was reported.
Simon Henderson, the school Head Master, wrote to parents saying “a number of symptomatic boys and staff tested positive” for the virus, according to the Daily Mail.
Pupils will be taught remotely until the end of term in order to prevent the number of cases spiralling out of control, the paper reported. He did not specify the number of cases that had been confirmed within the college.’
Reports the Torygraph of a story in the Fail!
No threat of emergency powers action against Bozo’s clown school Alma Mater.
So if you are a toff child you are already sent home to protect your Xmas but if you are in a state school you are advised to risk infecting your parents and grandparents or trying to self isolate in your bedroom (if you have one) through Xmas by act of Emergency Powers!
Contrast that with Merkel who a few days ago begged her federal states that closing schools 3 days earlier so that kids could see their grand fathers and grand mothers safely at Xmas, was a price worth paying in this once on a hundred year pandemic.
This singularly illustrates the heartless nature of our government and establishment towards the majority of our citizens.
BASTARDS
Where do they learn to be such sociopaths?
The Torygraph curiously interjects in its story -‘The move at Eton come amid a free-speech row at the £42,500-a-year school.
Will Knowland was sacked for gross misconduct after recording a lecture which questioned “current radical feminist orthodoxy” and then refusing to remove it from his YouTube channel.
The school’s appeal panel met on Tuesday and is due to deliver its verdict early next week. Eton has said the dismissal was “not a matter of free speech” but one of “internal discipline”.’
Lols, as the Jesuits would say ‘give me a child at six’ so says the Whore masters of England, ‘I’ll give you a whole bunch of bozo’s who never grow up and stamp on the proles as they are driven to agree to policies which will keep them as suffering dumb beasts they are reared to be while cementing the exceptionalism for the few.
The school issue s the big one
TRhey known people will die as a result f children spreading this virus at Christmas and they threaten legal action to permit this to happen
Easy tiger!
The operative word is ‘We’ – there’s lots of us, but maybe not enough.
I had to listen to a family friend not so long ago pour scorn on the working class whom she blamed for BREXIT (she was a ex-head of service in the public sector who lives in splendid isolation in a huge bungalow in a North Yorkshire); another middle class neighbour (a director of a company) saying that people should have IQ tests before being allowed to vote.
None of these middle class people (and many more) have yet understood that BREXIT was and still is a rich person’s escapade, and that there has been very expensive and undemocratic mass manipulation of public opinion to get us to this point.
All true
The sad thing is, I remember my dad saying pretty much the same stuff 40 years ago.
On a positive note the US Supreme Court has finally kicked into touch the Republican Party’s baseless claim the United States’s electoral system is fraudulent. Eventually therefore I’m optimistic the UK will now get not Marshall Aid but Biden Aid. Officially it will be called the British Recovery Program and will be conditional on the Conservative led government resigning and a Coalition government being formed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_Plan
I agree with most of that especially the GNU elevation of Starmer as Bozo goes off to enjoy his billionaires lifestyle for his remaining days for having finally delivered the hard BrexShit.
The US policy would not be different under any potus.
The cfr dictates that.
The only quibble I have is with the received narrative that Trump hasn’t had a Gauntlet.
There is plenty of circumstantial evidence that hasn’t so far been proved false. Even if we dislike Trump we shouldn’t necessarily ignore voter fraud. Like we have with our own GE last year.
https://turcopolier.typepad.com/sic_semper_tyrannis/2020/12/the-anatomy-of-a-stolen-election-the-fraud-cannot-stand.html
Helen
You have a great point, but the U.S. for all its failings is a more ‘out in the open’ political economy than the UK whose rather more unproven and informal arrangements (which are now subject to the whim of what is effectively as lawless upper/monied class) have been essentially broken.
The class system in the UK essentially never went away. The Establishment – now engorged with more money that it has ever had in its life, and well positioned to add to its wealth through BREXIT – has now truly decoupled from society and doesn’t care who knows it.
We are from a historical comparative POV entering (maybe) a era of pre-revolution? It would be nice to think so.
My family had a socially distanced pre-Xmas meet up yesterday and I was struck by my wealthy mild-mannered, polite middle class ex-public school boy brother in law: he just announced that he hated the way the country was at the moment and he voiced his willingness to shorten the lives of the whole cabinet.
As a working class lad who had been admonished for voicing such an opinion regularly since 2010, I found this interesting and quite validating!! But I took it as an indication that some line had been crossed – his opinion was something that they were hearing in the social circles they inhabited (monied, successful).
I still think however that it could be one of their own who brings them down – someone one somewhere in the Establishment has not thought this through and is going to suffer and that is how it might start.
Out here in Struggle Street I sense however hopelessness and a feeling of ‘untogetherness’ – there is a surfeit of opinion about how we got this way, so the divide and conquer that O’Brien talks of is real and effective. I ask you – why are we selling more Scotch eggs? There are too many Englishman who defer to money Helen.
It could be that we have to look to the Tories own immediate (and reasonable) hinterland for an ‘answer’ to the ‘problem’. Only factions in the Establishment might help us – those who are left who had some feeling of responsibility to look after those who lived on the Estate etc.
‘Modern’? Huh! We’re still bloody medieval here – it never went away and Margaret Hilda Thatcher brought it all back.
Is the Overton Window moving?
I can’t disagree with most of his points, but the hypocrisy of the man is hard to beat.
He says he hates to see how angry and bitter people are, and that they’ve been made that way. Yes, by him! His job is literally to make remainers think leave voters are a bunch of gullible, irrational idiots.
He frames his monologues as though he is trying to talk to and help and inform his leave listeners (likely a small minority) whilst at the same time painting them all as racist nationalist bigots.
He lambasts Nigel Farage, but didn’t seem to have a problem with sharing a schedule with him at LBC for the last 3 years?
People like JO’B like to take the moral high ground on issues like BLM and FSM but are quiet when it comes to supporting the economic, political and social change that is required for these problems to actually be resolved.
Even on his raisin d’etre – Brexit – the only way of stopping it was to back Labour in the last election. He’s intelligent enough to have seen this. Yet he and many avid remainers assisted in the demonisation of Corbyn that was so clearly counterproductive if they actually wanted to remain in the EU.
Why? Because they do very nicely for themselves with the current status quo, and a progressive government/society is (in their eyes) a much bigger threat to that than Brexit ever will be.
Wow.
You do realise that Remainers are by now a significant majority in the country?
And they really are able, in a great many cases, to think for themselves
What a load of patronising twaddle in other words
And as for he’s a hypocrite to be an a station with Farage, then I am for having written fr the Guardian when Farage has too
WHat utter nonsense
His words suggest on occasion that he thinks significant numbers of Brexit voters have realized that they were manipulated and are now allowing themselves to be manipulated again. Perhaps I am in a bubble here in Epping Forest, but I certainly haven’t noticed any signs of intellectual concession with regards to Brexit around here. I’m not even confident of such before the next general election, regardless of any Brexit induced coming economic downturn (which Covid potentially provides some partial cover for).
Are others noticing different? Are there any serious grounds for optimism about a change of heart in England?
Regards
I have certainly encountered changes minds
I am not suggesting it is all, of course
But some, definitely
JOB basically proposes that we should be nice to each other, without backing the measures necessary to create the economy whereby this goal can be achieved.
Our opponents in this political economy argument are callous, lying thieves, quite content to allow children to starve, thousands of people to die of Covid unnecessarily, and to crash our whole economy so that a few can make fortunes.
Sorry mate, asking folk to be nice just doesn’t cut it.
His position is a good starting point
Pilgrim Slight Return said
“I had to listen to a family friend not so long ago pour scorn on the working class whom she blamed for BREXIT (she was a ex-head of service in the public sector who lives in splendid isolation in a huge bungalow in a North Yorkshire); another middle class neighbour (a director of a company) saying that people should have IQ tests before being allowed to vote. ”
Only 17 percent of leave voters were working class. Brexit is a middle class phenomenon. Google Danny Dorling.
https://youtu.be/eOMiUONDLno